


Off Switch

by Tonbury



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 21:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16605404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tonbury/pseuds/Tonbury
Summary: An alternate s3, set in summer '86.Prologue: A new success story.





	Off Switch

“Martin...” Brenner calls to himself. Softly, gently. He’s been through so much - so much. Be gentle. “Martin...” 

He’s around here somewhere. Yes - crouched perhaps behind a conference table, black and wilted like an undelivered rose, or tucked neatly under one of the hotel’s beds (playing the bogeyman, heh heh, maybe, finally, the one that so many little girls imagined him to be), or shielded by an arc of vines prowling along the walls, the oily veins of this place, still frames of snake-in-motion, about to strike... Not in the open, though. Never the open. The thing in the sky keeps to Indiana these days, most of the time, but its agents are everywhere. Watching, listening. Like he himself used to. Closed-circuit cameras and tapped phone lines, and wires everywhere... his homeworld’s own network of oily veins in the walls... 

Heh heh. 

He searches the lower floors first, methodically, senses with every inhale the contours of his surroundings: the sharp corners of wrong turns, flashes of heat where other trespassers (rodents, mostly, who’ve crawled through the breaches the beasts make, fulfilling the prophecy of their evolution even here: the stowaways, the plague-bearers) are gnawing their way through tortured facsimiles of reality, and of course the Drift, as he calls it, always the clutter of it in his throat, breaths of wooly white smoke; it reminds him of cottonwood, his days in upstate New York before the war, blankets of seedlings dressing the summer ground, even then an epidemic, swelling his eyes and strangling his sinuses... 

Focus, Martin. “Martin...”

Not here. Upstairs, then. He rises slowly, the low groaning of this place ( _ this place  _ \- all this time and he has no better name for it) singing to him. The lovesong of the Thing in the Sky. In the lab before Hawkins he had a menagerie of creatures they gave him to test on - dogs and cats, of course, and the real prize, three  _ P. troglodytes _ , our closest cousins, those ludicrous might-have-beens who share so much of our DNA (and yet how crucial that missing piece...). Useful, all, if insufficient. Ah, but in the back, an interloper most unusual:  _ Octopus vulgaris _ . A clever creature. On the second morning Brenner found it suctioned against the outside of another fish tank, one tentacle slid through a compartment in the filter, feeling about for prey. That night he locked the cephalopod in a more secure enclosure, only to find it free again come sunrise. Not an isolated incident, he discovered, when he consulted colleagues; no, a familiar conundrum, how to keep these otherworldly invertebrates contained. 

The Thing in the Sky reminds him of nothing more than  _ Octopus vulgaris.  _ And soon, he suspects, no matter how we try to shut it away, it will slip from its tank and latch onto another...

He’s in a corridor on the 14th floor when he finds himself: a pitiful creature, collapsed on the floor of a linen closet in a nest of sheets and towels, this rotten egg of a man... His father was a painter - a bad one - and he imagines himself as portraiture, here and now, brushstrokes exaggerating the irradiated pockmarks on his face, pale from malnutrition, dry lips scarred in crosshatch. The brass title plate below it: “Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen...” 

Mmm. Settling back inside himself feels like wrestling a hand into a used rubber glove; the body fights it, all friction and combative elasticity, wanting to stretch into shapes not its own. Brenner moans. “Martin,” he says to himself. “I’ve brought you a very special gift, today.”

The chill takes him now, the humid, morning-breath inertia of disease, and he rests his head on the sensation like a pillow, well-worn and fit for last resorts, for holding against his face until his breaths become memories, become rat food... But it hasn’t come to that. He has learned to medicate, to immunize: to chew on the glands of the native fauna, make their defenses his own (all that experimental zoology good for something after all), to char his lungs with cinders from the few flowers that brave this place. To mask his scent with the tar the plant life here produces, their own mockery perhaps of photosynthesis (not  _ photo _ , of course, not light; this place glows - purple like a new bruise, the aurora that trauma leaves - but there is no sun, no days or nights; in time he is a castaway, glimpsing now and then hints of planes that might rescue him, paper planes folded from calendar pages changing now and then on the walls). To set traps for the hellhounds. To sleep with his mouth fastened shut, lest a leech plant itself in his stomach.

To survive. 

But mere survival is no life. And he has so much to share with the world.

“Do you still have the pen, Martin?” He uses his lips, now, and his words have the sound of exhaust to them. Of mere byproduct. He is sick of his voice. In his dreams he remembers other voices, drinks them in like good scotch. Listens to them like gospel. He has never felt much in the way of sexual desire, that collection of obsolete urges mere distraction, mere annoyance; but he wonders if this longing for the sound of other voices is similar to the way others experience lust - irrational and consuming, profoundly synaesthetic, tasted in colors on the inside of his chest... The boy - the lost boy, Byers - he heard his mother’s voice, when he was here. He must have, to have responded, as the lab’s surveillance suggests he did. How?  _ How?  _ He has seen the imprints of other lives, read them during his psychedelic episodes, but hears nothing at all... 

The pen in question is a cheap ballpoint, kept near his heart in his shirt pocket. His fingers stumble as they grope for it, slippery with years of sweat... The pen barely works, now, inkless save for a few drops that have clotted in the cartridge. Replacing it proved impossible. This place is not a full world unto itself, merely an adjunct, a film laid overtop; if he borrows a pen from the concierge desk and puts it in his pocket, it will be back on the desk when he next looks for it. What has he written, these last three years, to dry the pen so? Observations, at first, on quickly yellowing sleeves, when he still held out hope for a quick escape; then diagrams, short-lived (erased quickly by this one-way-mirror-world), for tools to help him survive. 

The latest strokes, however, the most precious, have been spent repeating the two voices he can still conjure most vividly - the last two he heard, before his exile. One familiar, one new, each with its own mantra:  _ “Mike... Mike... Mike...” “Blood... blood...” _

The pen shakes in his hands. “Are you ready, Martin?” he asks. 

He closes his eyes. His left sleeve is already rolled up - has been for weeks. “You know our rule...” Rasp, cough. The pen tip feels cold as he presses it into his wrist. “Only success stories...” Harder. Even were there ink left, it would not be enough. “...earn themselves...” Cold turns to heat. Dulled nerves protest. “...a designation.” He lets out a wet scream as the skin breaks, as he pulls the dull point in a circle. “Be g-gentle,” he pleads with himself. The pen comes out; he whimpers in relief. No waiting this time - he stabs down hard, pierces on the first go, lets a low, nauseous wail out. “Y-you’re - a s-success story now. You’ve d-done it Martin.” Out again. In again, one last time. His arm is a awash in blood. “Blood... blood...” he says, a pale imitation of the sweetness of other voices. He laughs. This place has taught him to laugh - heh heh. 

And then it’s done.

Afterwards he sits a long while, just staring at the numbers. They’re ugly things. Discolored. Violently imprecise. Nothing like the others. Around him the cephalopod’s lovesong ebbs and flows. Ah, and there are howls growing closer, footsteps in gallop-meter, in the stairwell. That’s alright. He’s a success story, now. 

“Are you ready, Martin?” he asks himself, though he already knows the answer:

Yes. 013 will be ready for them.

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1, "The Wish," coming soon! Will be Mike/El PoV.


End file.
